Security is a major issue in corporate information technology departments. Many times, an employee may have sensitive information that may be on a portable device, such as a laptop. If the laptop were ever stolen or lost, the sensitive information may be compromised, leading to many potential legal and business issues.
Many encryption systems may be available for encrypting or otherwise protecting data. Such systems, if applied to an entire data storage system, may cause a large amount of computational overhead to be expended. In many deployments, encryption systems may apply encryption to a limited set of files, such as the files contained in specific folders of a file system.
Problems may occur when a user moves a file out of a protected directory to an unprotected directory, either intentionally to avoid slow access times due to encryption, or inadvertently. Such files may be left unprotected and a company may be at risk of losing sensitive data.